(No actual animals in this article. The patients here are markets.)
Part 1 of 4 — Why I’m Building Tools for Markets That Don’t Exist Yet
In 1974, I was a young engineer in Ontario, converting manual travel-demand calculations into Fortran for one of Canada’s first full metropolitan transportation studies. By 1977, I was helping assemble a consortium bid for the Caracas subway. A decade later, I was doing PhD research on product family manufacturing — why factories that make related but not identical things behave so differently from textbook assembly lines. Then came two decades of building software tools for explaining complex industrial systems, followed by work on global standards for tracking shipping containers and truck loads.
I mention this not as credentialism, but because it explains what happens to you when you spend fifty years moving across that many domains. You stop being surprised by surface differences. You start seeing skeletons.
That is exactly what happened when I started looking at failing and underperforming markets.
The zoo analogy
Imagine a veterinarian who works at a zoo. His patients include a giraffe, a fruit bat, a wolverine, and a harbour seal. To a visitor, these animals have nothing in common — different sizes, different habitats, different diets, wildly different behaviour. But the veterinarian sees past the fur and the fins. He reads x-rays and blood panels. Underneath, every one of these creatures has a spine, a heart, lungs, a liver. The diagnostic toolkit is the same. The treatment logic is portable.
That is how I see thin markets.
A thin market is any market where willing buyers and willing sellers exist — and a transaction would genuinely benefit both — but the transaction doesn’t happen. The market fails silently. No alarm goes off. The deal just… doesn’t exist.
On the surface, the examples look bewilderingly unrelated. A heritage barn restoration in rural Ontario, where the general contractor cannot find a certified timber framer within 600 kilometres. A Saskatchewan farmer with a single shipping container of high-protein malting barley and no way to reach the Filipino craft brewer who actually wants it. A family in the Ottawa Valley who needs a collaborative family lawyer specialising in a custody arrangement that no local practitioner handles.
Three completely different worlds. But read the x-ray, and every one of them suffers from the same five forces:
- Discovery failure — the participants can’t find each other.
- Information asymmetry — they can’t evaluate what they’ve found.
- Trust deficit — they have no basis for believing what the other side claims.
- Offering complexity — what’s being traded won’t fit a drop-down menu or a standard SKU.
- Participant scarcity — there simply aren’t enough players in a local radius to create competitive pressure.
Five forces. Present in every case. Different weights, different flavours — but the same diagnostic checklist.
Two kinds of failure
Not all thin markets fail in the same way. Some are latent — the market could exist, but it doesn’t. No one has built the infrastructure, and the potential participants don’t even know there’s a counterparty out there. The Saskatchewan barley grower and the Filipino craft brewer are a latent market: each exists, neither knows the other does, and no transaction has ever been attempted.
Other thin markets do function — partially, expensively, and haphazardly. They depend on human brokers, traders, and coordinators who use personal networks, phone calls, trade shows, and hard-won relationships to muscle through the five forces by sheer effort. The Ethiopian produce middlemen are this kind of intermediary. So are the freight brokers in North American trucking, the export consultants who help SMEs navigate foreign markets, and the trade show organisers who create temporary bursts of market thickness at enormous cost.
This human-powered approach is labour-intensive, costly, error-prone, and myopic — limited to whatever the broker can personally see and remember. It works well enough to capture some value, but it leaves most of the market’s potential unrealised.
The opportunity, then, is twofold: bring latent markets into existence, and make existing ones dramatically more effective. Both require the same underlying capabilities — the same x-ray, the same diagnostic toolkit.
Why this matters to me personally
I am retired. I am self-funded. Nobody is paying me to look at these patterns, and no board is asking me to ship a product. I have the rarest resource a person can have at this stage of a career: time, combined with the freedom to follow curiosity wherever it leads.
I’m using that freedom because I’m genuinely worried. AI is arriving fast, and its default trajectory is to further entrench the platforms that already dominate — to concentrate even more power in markets that are already efficient and well-served. Amazon gets more efficient. Google’s ad market gets more precise. The winners keep winning.
But thin markets are where AI could do something radically different. The same capabilities — semantic matching, conversational onboarding, trusted intermediation, 24/7 autonomous agency — that make big platforms more dominant could also be deployed to make small, broken, invisible markets functional for the first time. For small businesses. For independent professionals. For producers in developing countries who currently lose half their margin to middlemen because there is no alternative discovery mechanism.
I can see the pattern. I can’t unsee it. And I have the time to do something about it.
The question is: how big is “something”?
Try $10 trillion in missing global commerce. That’s not a guess — it’s a sector-by-sector estimate anchored in the academic transaction cost literature. In Part 2, I’ll show you where that number comes from and why it’s conservative.